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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

For developers familiar with MySQL, you've probably heard that MariaDB is the next generation of the database engine. MySQL has long been the traditional database in Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) environments. However, MariaDB has gained popularity as an alternative. MariaDB is a fork of the original MySQL codebase, created to ensure continuity and avoid the potential pitfalls after MySQL was acquired by Oracle. Developers will find that the syntax is similar, but MariaDB introduces several notable differences.

Although MySQL remains embedded in several large technology businesses, MariaDB is often seen as a popular new-generation database for enterprises. MariaDB supports higher data transfer volumes and is supported by most cloud providers. Its similarity to MySQL, which was the dominant database in the early 2000s, has facilitated its adoption.

The key differences between MariaDB and MySQL form the foundation of MariaDB's performance. MariaDB offers several more storage engines and supports over 200,000 connections. MySQL's Enterprise edition includes proprietary code, while MariaDB is completely open-source. These differences contribute to MariaDB's superior speed. In recent benchmark testing, MariaDB performs somewhere between 13% to 36% faster than MySQL.

Since MariaDB is a fork from MySQL, the syntax is similar, but MariaDB has several additional features. Basic SQL syntax remains the same, but MariaDB handles data storage and functions differently. Each new version of MariaDB includes added features and extensions.

One example of a feature in MariaDB not available in MySQL is the SEQUENCE feature. In MySQL, you use the AUTO_INCREMENT feature to add a unique incremented integer to each row created in a table. With SEQUENCE, you can create a custom sequence that starts at a specific value and increments by a custom value.

The following is an example of the SEQUENCE function:

CREATE SEQUENCE s START WITH 10 INCREMENT BY 10;

MySQL was introduced in 1995 and became the dominant database engine in the early 2000s. It's used by some of the world's largest companies such as Facebook, GitHub, Airbnb, and YouTube. It handles billions of records and integrates easily into Linux environments, including affordable web hosting providers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Smart home defenses crumble when the NEO dog arrives.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it has developed a four-legged robot designed to jam the wireless transmissions of smart home devices. The robot was revealed at the 2024 Border Security Expo and is called NEO. It is built using the Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) and looks a lot like the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. 

According to the transcript of the speech by DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) director Benjamine Huffman, acquired by 404 Media, NEO is equipped with an antenna array that is designed to overload home networks, thus disrupting devices that rely on Wi-Fi and other wireless communication protocols. It will thus likely be effective against a wide range of popular smart home devices that use wireless technologies for communications.

Aside from taking out smart devices, law enforcement can also use the robot to communicate with subjects in the target area, and to provide remote eyes and ears to officers on the ground. “NEO can enter a potentially dangerous environment to provide video and audio feedback to the officers before entry and allow them to communicate with those in that environment,” says Huffman. “NEO carries an onboard computer and antenna array that will allow officers the ability to create a ‘denial-of-service’ (DoS) event to disable ‘Internet of Things’ devices that could potentially cause harm while entry is made.”

This roaming robotic jammer was first contemplated after a child sexual abuse suspect used his doorbell camera to see FBI agents at his door serving a search warrant. The gunman opened fire on them from behind the closed door with an assault-style rifle, killing two veteran agents and injuring three more.

Aside from the NEO, the DHS also built the ‘FLETC Smart House’, which is designed to train law enforcement about smart home devices and how they could be used against them. Huffman explained, “A suspect who has been searched and is under the control of officers can cause these actions to happen with a simple voice command which can start a chain of events to occur within a house, such as turning off lights, locking doors, activating the HVAC system to introduce chemicals into the environment and cause a fire or explosion to take place.”

This development shows how law enforcement is catching up with technological advancements. Smart home devices started becoming common in the mid-to-late-2010s, with many users installing them to automate several aspects of their houses and bolster security. So, anyone with a little bit of technical know-how and ingenuity could potentially create a hostile environment using readily available wireless electronics. While NEO might not be able to affect hard-wired smart devices, it would still be able to disable the radio frequencies most wireless IoT devices use, thus reducing the risks for law enforcement officers.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Today I'd like to revisit an often ignored/known method for tracking/hacking for SN discussion!

[Editor's Comment: Much of the discussion in the links originates from 2013-2016. That could mean several things. 1. It wasn't shown to be very effective, or 2. It is effective but very difficult to detect and counter. ]

Ultrasound Tracking Could Be Used to Deanonymize Tor Users
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ultrasound-tracking-could-be-used-to-deanonymize-tor-users/

Their research focuses on the science of ultrasound cross-device tracking (uXDT), a new technology that started being deployed in modern-day advertising platforms around 2014.

uXDT relies on advertisers hiding ultrasounds in their ads. When the ad plays on a TV or radio, or some ad code runs on a mobile or computer, it emits ultrasounds that get picked up by the microphone of nearby laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones.

These second-stage devices, who silently listen in the background, will interpret these ultrasounds, which contain hidden instructions, telling them to ping back to the advertiser's server with details about that device.

Advertisers use uXDT in order to link different devices to the same person and create better advertising profiles so to deliver better-targeted ads in the future.

Ultrasound Cross Device Tracking techniques could be used to launch deanonymization attacks against some users: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues/20214

Your home's online gadgets could be hacked by ultrasound: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2110762-your-homes-online-gadgets-could-be-hacked-by-ultrasound/

Beware of ads that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-that-use-inaudible-sound-to-link-your-phone-tv-tablet-and-pc/

Meet "badBIOS," the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/

Scientist-developed malware prototype covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/scientist-developed-malware-covertly-jumps-air-gaps-using-inaudible-sound/

Using Ultrasonic Beacons to Track Users: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/05/using_ultrasoni.html

Ads Surreptitiously Using Sound to Communicate Across Devices: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/ads_surreptitio.html

235 apps attempt to secretly track users with ultrasonic audio: https://boingboing.net/2017/05/04/235-apps-attempt-to-secretly-t.html

Leaking Data By Ultrasound: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/06/leaking-data-by-ultrasound/

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13924

Fermilab is a major US national lab with a budget of several 100M$ per year, focusing on particle physics. All is not well at the lab, however, following project delays and huge cost overruns for the flagship DUNE project. The organisation that operates Fermilab, led by University of Chicago, has had its contract withdrawn and the lab director Lia Merminga has been laid off. Now a pair of senior and well-respected scientists have put their oar in as well, blasting the management of the lab over the past decade that has led to the current situation in a paper posted to the arxiv preprint server. The pair point at many problems, based on a toxic working environment, giving anecdotal examples supported by indicators such as a fourfold increase in sick leave over the past decade.

The PDF is available here.

It's a fun read!

[Ed. note: It appears Lia Merminga has not been laid off]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You're not going crazy — you may actually be paying higher prices than other people | CNN Business:

It's hard not to get fired up by how much more everything costs compared to just a few years ago. But people making the same exact purchases as you aren't necessarily paying the same exact prices as you.

This became apparent to me a few weeks ago when a friend texted me that Starbucks was running a buy one, get one free drink promotion. But when I logged in to the app, the offer was nowhere to be found.

Why was my friend getting special treatment?

It's likely that Starbucks used artificial intelligence to determine that my friend, if offered a promotion, would make a purchase they wouldn't otherwise have, whereas I would make a purchase regardless, said Shikha Jain, a lead partner in the North American consumer and retail division at the consultancy firm Simon-Kucher.

The system nailed it for me — just opening the app to check if I had the promo got me to order, and I paid full price.

[...] The Seattle-based coffee chain declined to share what feeds into its AI model, dubbed Deep Brew. A spokesperson did, however, confirm that AI is powering the individualized offers it sends customers.

This personalized promotion strategy is not unique to Starbucks. Companies are increasingly leveraging customer data, often derived from loyalty programs, in coordination with machine-learning models to customize prices of goods and services based on an individual's willingness to pay.

[...] On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission sent orders to eight companies — Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture and McKinsey & Co — seeking information on how they allegedly offer surveillance pricing and services "that incorporate data about consumers' characteristics and behavior."

The orders seek to understand how technologies like AI along with consumers' personal information could be used "to categorize individuals and set a targeted price for a product or service," according to an announcement the FTC published Tuesday morning.

"Firms that harvest Americans' personal data can put people's privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement.

Inorganic production of oxygen in the deep ocean

JoeMerchant writes:

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-dark-oxygen-discovered-at-bottom-of-ocean-stuns-scientists

Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth's ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life.

"The discovery of oxygen production by a non-photosynthetic process requires us to rethink how the evolution of complex life on the planet might have originated," says SAMS marine scientist Nicholas Owens.

Scatterings of polymetallic nodules carpet vast areas of the ocean's bottom. We value these exact metals for their use in batteries, and it turns out that's exactly how the rocks may be spontaneously acting on the ocean floor. Single nodules produced voltages of up to 0.95 V. So when clustered together, like batteries in a series, they can easily reach the 1.5 V required to split oxygen from water in an electrolysis reaction.

This discovery offers a possible explanation for the mysterious stubborn persistence of ocean 'dead zones' decades after deep sea mining has ceased.

"In 2016 and 2017, marine biologists visited sites that were mined in the 1980s and found not even bacteria had recovered in mined areas. In unmined regions, however, marine life flourished," explains Geiger.

"Why such 'dead zones' persist for decades is still unknown. However, this puts a major asterisk onto strategies for sea-floor mining as ocean-floor faunal diversity in nodule-rich areas is higher than in the most diverse tropical rainforests."

As well as these massive implications for deep-sea mining, 'dark oxygen' also sparks a cascade of new questions around the origins of oxygen-breathing life on Earth.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After years of indecision on the issue of third-party cookies, Google has finally made a decision: on Monday, the company revealed that it would no longer pursue its plan to cut off support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Instead, Google played up other options that would hand more control of privacy and tracking to Chrome users.

As one alternative solution, Google touted its Privacy Sandbox, a set of tools in Chrome designed to help you manage third-party cookies that track you and deliver targeted ads. Google said that the performance of this tool's APIs would improve over time following greater industry adoption. That transition is likely to require a lot of effort by publishers, advertisers, and other participants, so Google has something else up its sleeve.

"In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice," Google said in a Monday blog post. "Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they'd be able to adjust that choice at any time."

[...] Third-party cookies have proven to be a contentious issue in the browsing world.

Users see them as a privacy violation, as advertisers use such cookies to track their activities across the internet to serve targeted ads. Regulators worry about flaws in the privacy tools available to users. Meanwhile, websites and advertisers view these cookies as a revenue source, as they provide insight into users' habits and interests. With all these parties weighing in on Google's plans, it's no wonder the company was kicking the can down the road.

[...] In an email to ZDNET, Longacre said: "If you ask me, the decision means Google is finally admitting the alternatives to third-party cookies are worse for targeting and no better for consumer privacy. That said, it was ultimately combined pressure from three groups -- regulators, advertisers, and publishers – that influenced Google to make this decision, in my opinion."

Other browser makers have been able to cut off support for third-party cookies without issue.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An innovative membrane that captures carbon dioxide from the air using humidity differences has been developed. This energy-efficient method could help meet climate goals by offering a sustainable carbon dioxide source for various applications. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com

Direct air capture was identified as one of the ‘Seven chemical separations to change the world’. This is because although carbon dioxide is the main contributor to climate change (we release ~40 billion tons into the atmosphere every year), separating carbon dioxide from air is very challenging due to its dilute concentration (~0.04%).

Prof Ian Metcalfe, Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies in the School of Engineering, Newcastle University, UK, and lead investigator states, “Dilute separation processes are the most challenging separations to perform for two key reasons. First, due to the low concentration, the kinetics (speed) of chemical reactions targeting the removal of the dilute component are very slow. Second, concentrating the dilute component requires a lot of energy.”

These are the two challenges that the Newcastle researchers (with colleagues at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Imperial College London, UK, Oxford University, UK, Strathclyde University, UK, and UCL, UK) set out to address with their new membrane process. By using naturally occurring humidity differences as a driving force for pumping carbon dioxide out of air, the team overcame the energy challenge. The presence of water also accelerated the transport of carbon dioxide through the membrane, tackling the kinetic challenge.

The work is published in Nature Energy and Dr. Greg A. Mutch, Royal Academy of Engineering Fellow in the School of Engineering, Newcastle University, UK explains, “Direct air capture will be a key component of the energy system of the future. It will be needed to capture the emissions from mobile, distributed sources of carbon dioxide that cannot easily be decarbonized in other ways.”

“In our work, we demonstrate the first synthetic membrane capable of capturing carbon dioxide from air and increasing its concentration without a traditional energy input like heat or pressure. I think a helpful analogy might be a water wheel on a flour mill. Whereas a mill uses the downhill transport of water to drive milling, we use it to pump carbon dioxide out of the air.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Last week, Applied Materials pulled back the curtain on its latest materials engineering solutions designed to enable copper wiring to scale down to 2nm dimensions and below while also reducing electrical resistance and strengthening chips for 3D stacking.

The company's Black Diamond low-k dielectric material has been offered since the early 2000s. It surrounds copper wires with a special film engineered to reduce the buildup of electrical charges that increase power consumption and cause interference between electrical signals.

Applied Materials has now come up with an enhanced version of Black Diamond, which reduces the minimum k-value even further, enabling copper wiring scaling to the 2nm node while also increasing mechanical strength – a critical property as chipmakers look to stack multiple logic and memory dies vertically.

But scaling the copper wiring itself as dimensions shrink is another enormous challenge. Today's most cutting-edge logic chips can pack over 60 miles of copper wires that are fashioned by first etching trenches into the dielectric material and then depositing an ultra-thin barrier layer to prevent copper migration. A liner layer goes down next to aid copper adhesion before the final copper deposition fills the remaining space.

The problem is that at 2nm dimensions and below, the barrier and liner layers consume an increasingly large percentage of the available trench volume, leaving little room for sufficient copper fill and risking high resistance and reliability issues. Applied Materials has solved this predicament with this brand-new materials concoction.

Their latest Integrated Materials Solution (IMS) combines six different core technologies into one high-vacuum system, including an industry-first pairing of ruthenium and cobalt to form an ultra-thin 2nm binary metal liner. This allows a 33% reduction in liner thickness compared to previous generations while also improving surface properties for seamless, void-free copper adhesion and reflow. The end result is up to 25% lower electrical resistance in chip wiring to boost performance and reduce power leakage.

Applied Materials claims that all leading logic chipmakers have already adopted its new copper barrier seed IMS with ruthenium CVD technology for 3nm chip production, with 2nm nodes expected to follow.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

UK communications regulator Ofcom has banned mid-contract price rises linked to inflation.

The change, which comes into effect from January 2025, means that price rises must be clearly written into contracts. Ofcom noted that BT and Vodafone had already changed their pricing practices accordingly.

Cristina Luna-Esteban, Ofcom Telecoms Policy Director, criticized the practice of vendors tying customers into contracts where the price could change based on inflation. Future inflation is difficult to predict, after all.

Luna-Esteban said. "We're stepping in on behalf of phone, broadband and pay TV customers to stamp out this practice, so people can be certain of the price they will pay, compare deals more easily and take advantage of the competitive market we have in the UK."

Ofcom proposed the ban in 2023 after UK inflation soared during the previous years, making it impossible for customers to predict what they might be paying during a contract's term. The imposition of early termination fees for customers seeking to escape what they saw as an unexpected rise added to the pain.

In theory, a customer could exit a contract without penalty if they weren't made aware of potential rises when signing the contract. However, providers were able to get around this by simply saying prices would rise by whatever the consumer price index was at the time, plus a certain percentage.

Therefore, the customer was made aware of a rise – but didn't know what it would be.

Ofcom's solution is to require the provider to clearly disclose the rises to avoid a situation in which customers do not know how much they will be expected to pay during their contract term.

[...] "Finally, broadband and mobile customers will know ahead of time exactly what they will pay for the duration of a contract, making it easier for them to properly manage their finances."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Botanists vote to remove racist reference from plants' scientific names:

[ Editor's Comment: caffra means 'infidel' in Arabic, and it was used as a racial slur against black (non-arabic) people, predominantly in South Africa. ]

Scientists have voted to eliminate the names of certain plants that are deemed to be racially offensive. The decision to remove a label that contains such a slur was taken last week after a gruelling six-day session attended by more than 100 researchers, as part of the International Botanical Congress, which officially opens on Sunday in Madrid.

The effect of the vote will be that all plants, fungi and algae names that contain the word caffra, which originates in insults made against Black people, will be replaced by the word affra to denote their African origins. More than 200 species will be affected, including the coast coral tree, which will be known as Erythrina affra instead of Erythrina caffra.

The scientists attending the nomenclature session also agreed to create a special committee which would rule on names given to newly discovered plants, fungi and algae. These are usually named by those who first describe them in the scientific literature. However, the names could now be overruled by the committee if they are deemed to be derogatory to a group or race.

A more general move to rule on other controversial historical labels was not agreed by botanists. Nevertheless, the changes agreed last week are the first rule alterations that taxonomists have officially agreed to the naming of species, and were welcomed by the botanist Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum in London, who presided over the six-day nomenclature session.

"This is an absolutely monumental first step in addressing an issue that has become a real problem in botany and also in other biological sciences," she told the Observer. "It is a very important start."

upstart writes:

Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we're determined to change that:

'It's never been more evident that for-profit publishing simply does not align with the aims of scholarly inquiry.' Photograph: agefotostock/AlamyView image in fullscreen'It's never been more evident that for-profit publishing simply does not align with the aims

Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google's. So we decided to start our own

If you've ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.

The annual revenues of the "big five" commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.

Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library doesn't subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.

The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we'd had enough, and resigned en masse.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

New research led by scientists at the University of Michigan reveals that the Arctic has lost approximately 25% of its cooling ability since 1980 due to diminishing sea ice and reduced reflectivity. Additionally, this phenomenon has contributed to a global loss of up to 15% in cooling power.

Using satellite measurements of cloud cover and the solar radiation reflected by sea ice between 1980 and 2023, the researchers found that the percent decrease in sea ice’s cooling power is about twice as high as the percent decrease in annual average sea ice area in both the Arctic and Antarctic. The added warming impact from this change to sea ice cooling power is toward the higher end of climate model estimates.

“When we use climate simulations to quantify how melting sea ice affects climate, we typically simulate a full century before we have an answer,” said Mark Flanner, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering and the corresponding author of the study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

“We’re now reaching the point where we have a long enough record of satellite data to estimate the sea ice climate feedback with measurements.”

[...] The Arctic has seen the largest and most steady declines in sea ice cooling power since 1980, but until recently, the South Pole had appeared more resilient to the changing climate. Its sea ice cover had remained relatively stable from 2007 into the 2010s, and the cooling power of the Antarctic’s sea ice was actually trending up at that time.

That view abruptly changed in 2016, when an area larger than Texas melted on one of the continent’s largest ice shelves. The Antarctic lost sea ice then too, and its cooling power hasn’t recovered, according to the new study. As a result, 2016 and the following seven years have had the weakest global sea ice cooling effect since the early 1980s.

owl writes:

https://pldb.io/blog/JohnOusterhout.html

Dr. John Ousterhout is a computer science luminary who has made significant contributions to the field of computer science, particularly in the areas of operating systems and file systems. He is the creator of the Tcl scripting language, and has also worked on several major software projects, including the Log-Structured file system and the Sprite operating system. John Ousterhout's creation of Tcl has had a lasting impact on the technology industry, transforming the way developers think about scripting and automation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Two new studies suggest that antibodies that attack people’s own tissues might cause ongoing neurological issues that afflict millions of people with the disease. 

When scientists transferred these antibodies from people with long COVID into healthy mice, certain symptoms, including pain, transferred to the animals too, researchers reported May 31 on bioRxiv.org and June 19 on medRxiv.org. 

Though scientists have previously implicated such antibodies, known as autoantibodies, as suspects in long COVID, the new studies are the first to offer direct evidence that they can do harm. “This is a big deal,” says Manali Mukherjee, a translational immunologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was not involved in the work. The papers make a good case for therapies that target autoantibodies, she says.

The work could also offer “peace of mind to some of the long-haulers,” Mukherjee says. As someone who has endured long COVID herself, she understands that when patients don’t know the cause of their suffering, it can add to their anxiety. They wonder, “What the hell is going wrong with me?” she says.

[...] Scientists have proposed many hypotheses for what causes long COVID, including SARS-CoV-2 virus lingering in the tissues and the reawakening of dormant herpes viruses (SN: 3/4/24). Those elements may still play a role in some people’s long COVID symptoms, but for pain, at least, rogue antibodies seem to be enough to kick-start the symptom all on their own. It’s not an out-of-the-blue role for autoantibodies; scientists suspect they may also be involved in other conditions that cause people pain, including fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.

But if doctors could identify which long COVID patients have pain-linked autoantibodies, they could try to reduce the amount circulating in the blood, says Iwasaki, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “I think that would really be a game changer for this particular set of patients.” 

The work represents a “very strong level of evidence” that autoantibodies could cause harm in people with long COVID, says Ignacio Sanz, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta. Both he and Mukherjee would like to see the findings validated in larger sets of participants. And the real clincher, Sanz says, would come from longer-term studies. If scientists could show that patients’ symptoms ease as these rogue antibodies disappear over time, that’d be an even surer sign of their guilt.